On 2011-03-23 14:25:02 Brad Alexander wrote:
>I just found a box in my basement that I haven't touched in many years. I
>checked sources.list, and it was built when woody was stable and sarge was
>testing. The box was running sid. So I thought it would be an interesting
>experiment to see what is involved to get it to a modern sid, or if it is
>even possible. The box is a PII/667. 192mb ram, 6gb drive.
Well, forget about pulling packages directly from current Sid. dpkg has grown
too many new features.
Update your sources.list to point to sarge from the archive, read the Sarge
release notes, and follow the upgrade procedures, likely "ending" in a full-
upgrade / dist-upgrade. Reboot, verify, and clean up.[1]
Repeat that for Etch.
Repeat for Lenny; remember that you will move back to your favorite mirror of
the master repositories, instead of the archives.
Repeat for Squeeze.
Now, fix up your sources.list the way you prefer: Sid only, Sid+testing,
Sid+experimental, something mixed, whatever. No release notes at this point,
but this list will be able to help you out if you hit too many issues. Dist-
upgrade, reboot, verify, and clean up.
It should work, but it won't be automated at all, unless services are
absolutely minimal and you weren't using a DE.
Use the package manager recommended in each release notes document. Sometimes
this is aptitude, sometimes it is apt-get, avoid using dselect if possible.
[1] This might not upgrade all your packages. It's unlikely, but possible,
that adding an appropriately date-versioned snapshot from snapshots.d.n of Sid
to your sources.list will ease some of the dependency issues. Try and remove
this snapshot as early as possible though, otherwise you might not realize
that some obsolete packages need to be replaced/uninstalled.
--
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